Improve Your Website with Quality Content
Website design isn’t just about making your site look pretty with rainbows and flowers or dazzling with special effects; your business website needs to be designed so that your customers easily find what they’re looking for. While you may think a nice logo and quality photographs of your products are vital, it’s actually your content that’s most important. Content — the words on the page — are often an overlooked factor in determining the effectiveness of your website.
Design alone doesn’t bring customers in and sell products to them.
Now, it’s OK to want a great design, a catchy logo, a memorable tagline and clear navigation buttons. In fact, you can use available tools to design and publish your own website, if you wish. But don’t forsake content for the other components of your site. Content is what drives search engines to you, enabling your site to show up high in search engine results. Good content also helps your customers.
Why Quality Content Is Still King
You may have the best designed website in the world, but if people don’t find it, it’s of absolutely no value to your business. Your website has to be discoverable, and to be discovered, it needs to show up in search results. People conduct searches before making a purchase, so get your site to show up in those searches.
There are many content strategies, but bear this in mind: While it’s important to have an About Us page and product or service pages on your website, consider having an area devoted to content, like a blog. A blog that you post on your site gives you a reason to provide fresh material, which appeals to search engines and customers. And it’s pages, not websites, that are ranked by search engines.
This means content rules when it comes to SEO.
Your content must be well written. It has to be compelling. It has to connect with your visitors. But there are other aspects that are just as important to include in your content so that it rises to the top in search engine results. Follow these six steps to make your content king.
1. Include Keywords
Any content you create has to include keywords — the terms with which your customers use to find your website. For instance, your keywords could be words that describe your product or service. If your business sells glasses, for example, your keywords may include:
- Glasses
- Glasses in [your city]
- Sunglasses
- Best glasses
- Popular glasses
- Safety glasses
- Shades
- Spectacles
- Specs
You get the idea. Use the keywords you choose as naturally as possible so that search engines connect your website to the words you want your business to be known for. If you already have content on your site, review it to ensure it reflects the keywords you want to highlight.
You wouldn’t mind if your site showed up more than once in a specific search, would you? Imagine if someone sees your site pop up several times in a single search. That builds trust for your business. That’s another value of having targeted blog posts.
2. Answer Questions
People have started using actual questions when conducting internet searches, particularly with voice searches courtesy of virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri. Your content should address actual questions that your customers are searching for, such as: “When do I need to wear safety glasses?” A frequently asked questions page can be a great resource for driving search results.
Search engines sometimes pull answers directly off websites, including a link to the site as credit for the answer. If your site is selected as having the best answer to a query, it may result in your site being found for other types of search queries, too. Using keywords and questions in your content — particularly those that are actual search terms people use to look for your product or service — drives results to your page.
3. Include Internal or Inbound Links
While preparing content, add inbound links. In other words, link to other relevant pages on your site. Internal links tie your website together, both for search engines and for visitors. Internal links also help your SEO. They help search engines find, index and understand your site.
In addition, inbound links provide added understanding and context for visitors. When you provide answers to questions through links, it builds trust. Additionally, internal links keep visitors on your site, which is also good for SEO.
4. Make It Share-able
People tend to share content that they find informative or insightful, so having quality content helps you with the share factor. When your content is shared, it helps increase the visibility of your business. It also ensures more people have access to your content.
Share-able content drives traffic to your website and adds more connections to your business as those shares proliferate. Since social media continues to grow, those shares help you grow your brand presence. That’s why you must have good quality content that people want to like and share through social media and on your website.
5. Provide Value to Those Who Land on Your Site
Once customers and potential customers reach your site — via search engine results, social media or some other route — you have to give them something valuable. When visitors stay on your site, it reduces your bounce rate, the measure of customers who leave your site after arriving. And here’s the kicker:
Bounce rate is bad for SEO.
Having quality content engages visitors and keeps them on your site. They want to read what you have to share, and they may even share it directly from the site. They’ll come to trust your brand. They’ll want to return to your site. Maybe they’ll even buy something when they’re ready. Increased engagement leads to higher traffic, more conversions and exponential sharing, all of which are good for business.
6. Keep It Fresh
To stay engaging, keep posting new content on your site — and that doesn’t mean a new About Us page every day. Provide fresh content on relevant topics. Search engines love that.
For instance, Google figures out if there’s a popular search phrase and then looks for newer content on the topic. That content gets rewarded with enhanced search results. Make sure you’re staying on top of the trends in your industry and keep producing quality content that’s of interest to search engines and customers.
Final Thoughts
Content has become one of the most important components in SEO. That’s true for blog posts, website content, frequently asked questions and social media content. By including valuable, relevant, updated resources on your site, you improve your SEO and increase your brand awareness.
Fresh, quality content builds trust in your customers and potential customers, and it displays your business as an expert in your industry. These six steps to better website content enable your business to wear a content king crown. And that’s worth a little extra investment.
Guest Post Author Bio: Danielle Canstello is part of the team at Pyramid Analytics. They provide enterprise-level analytics and business intelligence software. In her spare time, Danielle writes around the web to spread her knowledge of the marketing, business intelligence and analytics industries.